Edhat Staff
Rendering of 711 N. Milpas apartment complex
By edhat staff
The Santa Barbara City Council upheld an appeal to push forward with the controversial apartment complex proposal on North Milpas.
The owner of Capitol Hardware and its building proposed a 4-story modern apartment complex with mixed business space at 711 N. Milpas Street. The project consists of 2,759 square feet of commercial space, 76 residential units, 88 vehicle parking spaces, and the merger of 8 lots to create a 66,199 square foot lot.
In a 5-2 vote, the council upheld the appeal filed by RRM Design Group and the property owner which denied the Architectural Board of Review’s appeal to deny final approval.
Those opposed to this project have complained this will cause parking issues and ruins the aesthetic of the Milpas neighborhood and will further gentrify the area pushing out lower-income families. It’s also been alleged the building would take over a pedestrian sidewalk for children walking through to Santa Barbara Junior High School and use it as a private entrance to commercial parking spaces, thus causing pedestrian risks.
The residential units will range in size from 569 to 805 square feet with the average size being 685 square feet. The proposed density for the merged lots is 50 dwelling units per acre.
Related Articles
March 24, 2019: Op Ed – Milpas Development to Affect Pedestrian Safety
March 19, 2019: Op Ed – Reviewing Oversized Building Proposed on Milpas
A new building causes children to injure themselves on theit way to school??? You mean they are caught off guard at the sudden change and stumble into oncoming traffic? There are plenty of ways kids can avoid the construction site to reach their campus without having to go out of their way do so. Kids can figure it out on their own without bulldozer parents getting in the way.
Vote for different people if you don’t like that “the state” is telling us what to do. This is just Monique Limon and Hannah Beth Jackson acting as voice of the “the state”. Elect new voices next time. “The State” has no right to tell us anything let alone telling us to keep building beyond our own resources. Send a new message by electing new people. Simple as that.
City Hall has been overdeveloping Santa Barbara for the last 30 years. Greed has no boundaries. It’s always a five hour meeting. It’s always hand wringing and regret. And it’s always APPROVED, APPROVED, APPROVED. Just look around town. Shoe-horned structures, incompatible architecture, outrageously inadequate parking, traffic jams. Thanks to a decent, wet winter, Lake Cachuma is currently at 75%. The frenzy to build, it’ll be a mud puddle in no time. The solution is two-step: Kick the bums out of City Hall, and tell Sacramento to take RHNA an shove it.
City council is overdevoping Santa Barbara as a way to get more permit money, fee money, and taxes to pay for government employee pensions.
Harmon showed her true colors. Thick as thieves with Cathy Murillo is she. She blew her vote. A huge portion of the speakers were from the 6th and 1st Districts. They won’t forget her vote. She is not Santa Barbara. She is not with residents. She needs to be replaced ASAP along with the rest who voted for this project. Did anyone see Gutierrez? Councilmember is well above his pay grade. The Dems like them stupid and cowed. Harmon seems smart, but if she isn’t going to stand up and fight for us she needs to go! We need people that will clean up City Hall not pollute it more than it already is.
Jason Dominguez and Kristen Sneddon are the two shining stars on Council. The rest need to be kicked to the curb.
Looks like it’ll be a lovely new complex with beautiful new market rate housing. Just what the city needs. Well done, city council, approving this development.
We need to organize against City Hall. Murillo is a sellout. Friedman is a nincompoop. Gutierrez is a dullard. Rowse is detached. Harmon is duplicitous. With Councilmembers like these Santa Barbara is doomed if we don’t do something quick.
The only City Council members to question anything were Jason Dominguez and Kristin Sneddon. They possess critical thinking skills, care about the future of Santa Barbara, and actually give a crap about their constituents. None of the others meet this criteria!
EdHat, your reporting needs to be better. ‘further gentrification’ – there is no gentrification of Milpas at present. That has happened on East Haley, you might have noticed. The Lagoon District promoters love it. But gentrification has not occurred on Milpas. It’s much as it has been for decades.
The state has mandated that all cities must comply with creating more housing to solve our present housing crisis. The Huntington Beach court case is a smackdown from the state to cities that that won’t build due to NIMBYISM. Santa Barbara’s city attorney was well aware of this, and had to guide the council not to expose the city to similar litigation.
The sidewalk argument was shown during the hearing to be specious. The sidewalk disappears into dirt where people park. The project will fix that, and the dead-end will look better with landscaping and trees.
You have to wonder what all those folks were so upset about. Is the architecture of Jack In The Box, KFC, the Pechanga Bar, and the car wash really so stellar? Did the neighbors miss the horde of homeless now camping openly at the underpasses? The never-ending vacancy at the old Altamirano’s? The takeover of Ortega Park? Did it escape their attention that ICE raids hurt hurt their Latino neighbors, who were not protesting this building?
No, they declared this building was the end of the world, while ignoring the real problems in their community.
Murillo dislikes Dominguez, and one way to disrespect him is to dump (in all senses of the word) on the Eastside…………………………..
…SB Independent, Feb 7, 2018 –
Political intrigue and personal bad blood circulated through the awkward debate and highly unusual decision by the City Council Tuesday night to strip Councilmember Jason Dominguez of his new position on the Santa Barbara County Association of Governments (SBCAG) and instead hand the seat to Mayor Cathy Murillo …………. Noozhawk, September 25, 2018 – Santa Barbara City Councilman Jason Dominguez says he plans to skip a City Council retreat this weekend, citing concerns about the meeting’s transparency…….. Hmmm, could transparency actually be an issue with the Council?
A-1553910294 (1/2 the commenters here have the same name), every property in 93103 that sells at market value is evidence of gentrification. Besides this, and contrary to what you seem to believe, the Eastside is not a sh*thole neighborhood. There are actually far fewer vagrants around here than on State Street, and how racist to assume that every Latino on the Eastside is here illegally. Regardless, the vast majority of our neighbors are what would be called “good neighbors.” Furthermore, if the Capitol Hardware project were redesigned to resemble Jack in the Box, KFC, and the Pechanga Bar, it would be an improvement.
Gentrification cometh to the Milpas area, and property value will go up in the residential areas. Working class families will be pushed out, and many have left the Eastside. Especially Latinos. It was a few years back that the Milpas Community Association (MCA) was trying to propose the Better Eastside Improvement District (EBID). But Murillo along with PODER protested against it because it was going to gentrify the Milpas area, according to her and PODER. Murillo voted in favor Alan Bleeker’s AUD Project. So therefore Murillo betrayed her own people, the Latino Milpas Community. So did Oscar Gutierrez.
Dominguez is good for the East Side though I don’t agree with everything he does…I like his concern he cares about the East Side.
They all read Edhat…
No we don’t .
So that’s a BS argument. It’s not evidence of gentrification if market value plummeted anymore than it is when they rise. That’s a function of supply and demand. I didn’t say Latinos on the Eastside were all here illegally, but now we know you trigger too easily. There are articles about how the ICE raids hurt the Latino businesses on Milpas. Read them yourself. I can just imagine how you’d love a 3 story Pechanga-style complex in the area.
#1 – That is butt ugly! #2 – Apparently there is no problem with water so I’m buying a truckload of sod and putting my lawn back in.
This development is a horrible plan. If the city must add housing , do it on the Sears lot.
Jason Dominguez spoke powerfully his own district’s concerns. Yet the pro-growth NIMBY city council majority ganged up on him. So much for district elections providing lost voices for local district concerns. The experiment of greater city-wide representation failed. Works just like the old Golden Triangle model of city council operations.
This is a bad deal made possible by some sort of corruption whereby elected politicians and review boards OK patently inappropriate community decisions and hide behind alleged state mandates. The next step is the fight on the Mesa against the “student housing” argument. What is going on here is that some rich people will get richer at the expensive of our standard of living. There is no doubt that the city could resist any demand made by the state either by forgoing some revenue or by litigating the inappropriateness of such demands in a limited water market such as SB. The decision not to do this is just too convenient for the investment capital political contributor class.
City staffers are convinced they need to bring in more people ,who will spend more money to support city tax revenues, that support their own salaries, perks and pensions. Of course they favor as much growth as they can get away with. Stop voting for city council members who so willingly go along with this city staff self-interest agenda.
Why must the city :keep adding housing”? Who imposed this alleged mandate on our overly stresses local resources in the fist place? This is no a casual question. One needs to seriously think through who sets policies like this. (Clue: those we the people elect to do this to us — and no one else)
No, the Sears lot is a poor housing choice. A much better use would be to turn the Sears building into a multiplex theater. That would re-energize all of La Cumbre Plaza and give the locals a nice place to watch movies without going downtown.
Sacramento has a name: Monique Limon and Hannah-Beth Jackson. We elect them to represent us in Sacramento. Are they working for us; or against us. Why do we keep them as our voices in Sacramento, if they keep doing this to us? This is a very serious question, voters. Why elect and re-elect those who continuously fail to represent us in Sacramento, and in fact who always vote in favor of state mandates that are destroying our local community. What happens when elected Democrats get to Sacramento and then suddenly become the voice of “the state” against us.